Busier & Busier

Busy Editor Gardner Cowles of Look (circ. 2,912,689) thought that U.S. readers were getting "busier & busier" all the time. What they needed in the way of a weekly news report, he decided, was something brief and handy to snatch up in their spare moments "on the bus or in the beauty parlor." Last week "Mike" Cowles gave them a new, 64-page magazine of "news, pictures [19 pages] and predictions" no bigger than a man's hand. Name: Quick. Price: 10-c-.

The first issue of Mike Cowles's tiny (4 by 6 in.) magazine had a picture of Ingrid Bergman on the yellow-and-black cover, as she might appear through a telescope focused on Stromboli. The longest story in the magazine was five sentences; most were told in one sentence that was merely a paraphrase of a headline. There were 25 departments (Science, Sports, Male & Female, Fashions, etc.). Among the biggest departments (four pages) was "Quick Predicts," a kind of Kiplinger letter in monosyllables.

Quick's 20,000-copy test run went on sale on newsstands in eight cities from Philadelphia to Tacoma--but not in Manhattan, where Editor & Publisher Cowles had dreamed it up. With Look's staff "and of course Fleur" (Mrs. Cowles), he had knocked the first issue together in four months. If the first issues caught on, Quick would probably go on a national distribution basis next month, get its own staff. Without ads, Cowles figured the new magazine would need 300,000 readers to break even. The trick for Quick was to find that number of busy people who would be satisfied to get their news of the world in the tiniest capsules ever dealt to them by any magazine.

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